


in the shadows

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Personhood, a boy and his heroic nightmare entity, imaginary friend batman, not that DC doesn't have those already, outlived the smol Bruce Wayne who made him up, the one where Batman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23135962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: “You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”“Batman…”“You’re confronting me now because you’re worried about my intentions toward Dick. He changed your mind about something. Ergo, you’ve been sitting on this for a while. How long have you known I wasn’t real?”
Relationships: Clark Kent & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 144
Kudos: 1105
Collections: Best Fics From Across The Multiverse, Excellent Completed Gen & Platonic Fiction, Identity Crisis





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this and dumped it directly into tumblr, where it was remarkably well-received. Crossposting here today in honor of batfamweek 2020's 'Magic/Fantasy AU' prompt. 💗

Batman wasn’t a person.

He faked it very well. When the League gathered, the line of his mask against pale skin looked natural and human, a little more perfectly fitted than the Flash’s but not quite as perfect as Green Lantern’s, which was an energy projection and not a real object and thus lay against his face flawlessly, without shift or gap.

His mouth didn’t bend into many expressions and his body language wasn’t voluble, but the emotive gestures that he did make were pretty normal. The rare smile seemed honest. He had a heartbeat, perfectly steady. His shadow (almost) always matched the shape that was blocking the light.

The stories that came out of Gotham, about the Bat—those could be exaggerations, born of terror and manipulated perception. Clark, of all people, knew how much you could convince people to believe things that weren’t real, because they made a better story. Even the scraps of photography and film showing a towering thing of black fog and long fangs could have been some clever trick with projectors.

The fact that Superman couldn’t see through his suit just meant it was well made.

He’d had to pool his observations with Diana and J’onn before he’d been sure he wasn’t imagining things. But Martian Manhunter knew shapeshifting, and said the block against his mind when he tried to touch Batman’s thoughts did not feel quite human. And Superman knew what posing as human looked like. And Wonder Woman knew truth, and its absence.

Batman wasn’t human. Which wasn’t the problem, of course.

The problem was that he was pretending he _was_. Pretending it rigorously in a situation where there shouldn’t be any need, unless he had something worse to hide. Pretending it in a way that overlaid on a certain inhuman predatory grace began to look very dangerous indeed.

Superman could see both things in him now, watching narrow-eyed through a roof into the room where Batman bent over a child’s bed, cape swirling up larger and darker than he let it get around them. The man and the hungry creature, flipping in and out of focus, neither ever gone but superimposed, like a trick picture that was two things at once.

Knuckles ghosted over the boy’s cheek, claws turned inward, and the child sighed softly, and sunk deeper into sleep. Batman’s heart wasn’t beating, but Clark could monitor the child’s vitals easily from here.

Batman drew his hand back, and tipped his head up—looking back at Superman as though the roof was no more a barrier to his perceptions than to Clark’s. Waited a beat, as if making sure his attention had been noticed, and then passed soundlessly between the other beds to the window, slid it open, and launched himself out through it and up onto the roof.

He didn’t bother to restrain himself to even a plausible approximation of human limits, now. The arm he reached up to the edge of the roof to pivot himself up by was too long, and his shoulder rotated further than it should have been able to, and he landed with impossible soundlessness in a billow of cape that was far, far larger than any cape that only reached to his heels should have managed, and which faded out at the edges into shadow. He knew he was found out.

Superman took the obvious invitation, and sunk down to join him. It was better, sitting like this, facing the same way on the ridgepole of a two-story building. Batman hadn’t hurt that child, that he could tell. There was no need to make this a confrontation.

“I don’t understand why,” he said at last. Out of deference for sleeping children, he kept his voice soft—he would have worried about a human being able to hear it, but now he knew he didn’t have to worry about that with Batman. “Why go to so much trouble to deceive us? We haven’t kept secret what we are. Not from you.”

Alien, alien, user of alien weapon, magical princess…

Batman sighed. He spoke almost as softly as Clark had, and his voice sounded the same as ever, except for the fact that a human voice couldn’t get this quiet without falling into a whisper. “I’m not like you.”

He turned. He’d let some of the details of his human mask fall away—what must have been the exhaustively rendered texture of skin, the flakes of it dry on chapping lips, a crease at the corner of his mouth that had suggested he scowled or smiled more, outside of his costume. There was no pretense of a jawbone, under the skin, though the jawline externally hadn’t changed. The cowl still looked like something he was wearing, but Clark knew it was not. It flexed like skin when Batman narrowed his blank white eyes and said, “I can see you know that.”

“You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”

Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”

“Batman…”

“You’re confronting me now because you’re worried about my intentions toward Dick. He changed your mind about something. Ergo, you’ve been sitting on this for a while. How long have you known I wasn’t real?”

That was such a bizarre choice of words Clark almost skipped answering the question to chase it down, but he held himself back. This wasn’t a story, and Batman wasn’t even a _hostile_ source so far, if it had been. “Wonder Woman, J’onn and I pooled our observations about four months ago, in April. We were pretty sure by the time we finished comparing notes.” He shrugged. “I suspected something a long time before that, but it’s hard to say when it started to be more than…a feeling.”

“A feeling,” Batman echoed. “Yes, it would start there.”

“So?” Superman prompted. He had _liked_ Batman. He was the last person who could insist that someone hiding the truth of his own nature was reprehensible, though the sting he’d felt about it was an uncomfortable reminder of how much most of his friends would resent _him_ , if they knew the truth. So he’d _meant_ to let it lie, until Batman chose to trust them, or gave them a reason not to trust him. “Why have you been visiting…Dick?”

It wouldn’t be suspicious on its own—well, not _very_ suspicious, all things considered, in context—except that Batman had changed, around the same time. Diana said his presence seemed deeper, Clark thought he seemed to be having trouble staying within the outlines of his human mask. J’onn agreed that he seemed somehow more powerful.

Batman stayed silent a long time. Eighteen heartbeats from the boy below them, slower than those of his peers because he had an athlete’s conditioning already and was more deeply asleep than most of them. At last, the being beside him confessed, “He’s carrying me.”

“What?”

“You noticed I’m stronger now,” Batman said matter-of-factly, in a way that almost managed to cover up emotion. “That’s his doing. I was…fading, when you met me. Not up to capacity. I’m not really meant to exist that way.” He glanced over at Superman again, as though evaluating his reaction, and Clark wondered if he had really needed to do that—if he really only saw out of his eyes. J’onn could make eyes anywhere he wanted some, but he needed them to see. Batman seemed somehow less constrained by biology than that.

“Is it hurting him?”

“No! No. It…shouldn’t.” Batman ghosted a sigh, voiceless, inhuman as the wind. “I don’t know that it’s good for a child to be _around_ me. But I’m not…taking anything from him. I’m not… _feeding_ on him, if that’s what you think.”

It was what Clark had feared. And probably anything that _would_ eat a child would also lie about it, but Batman was his teammate and very nearly his friend. So it was reassuring to have it so firmly denied. He’d come braced for _only a little_ and _no lasting damage_ and _he said it was fine_.

“Please,” he said. “Can you explain it to me?”

“I suppose I have to.” Batman tipped his head back, to look up at the few stars that smudged themselves visible through the red blanket of light-polluted smog overhead. Clark could make out more of them, even with his ordinary visible-light vision, than a human could have. He wondered what Batman saw. “Will you tell the others for me? Your little conspiracy?”

“Not Green Lantern and Flash?”

“Hal and Barry can figure me out on their own.” That dry sense of humor was the same, even if it was bending amusement onto a mouth that could no longer pass as human.

A breath Clark suspected he didn’t need was drawn. “A different little boy made me up,” Batman said. “Bruce Wayne. You can look the story up in the newspaper archives.

“It was a little over twenty years ago, in Gotham. A mugger shot his parents in front of him.” Another slanted glance, and then he looked away again. He certainly acted like he needed his eyes to see. “It wasn’t more terrible than things that happen to a hundred other people every day, really. But he was the right kind of terrified and angry, in the right place, at the right moment…the police reports all say he tackled the mugger from behind, and got lucky that the man hit his head. But it was me. I took him down.”

He raised his face back toward the smudged stars. “I was such a small thing, then. If that vengeance had been enough—the killer taken in and sentenced, brought to justice—I would have faded away again. Things like me are summoned and dispelled that way all the time. Or he could have taken me back into himself—the danger was past, it wasn’t a chronic part of his existence, so I would have reintegrated, probably, and not hung around rising up to protect him for the rest of his life, and probably disrupting it in the process.”

That amused quirk to the horizontal slash of a mouth, again. “But it wasn’t enough. Not for him. He clung. He _brooded_. He wanted to protect _everyone_. And I grew.” Bittersweet and fond. “I grew until I really could help. Until anyone could see me, any time I liked. Until I was solid enough to get in half a dozen fights in one night without my blows starting to go right through the enemy.”

There was no way Batman was letting him know these things about how he worked, when he wasn’t holding back, by accident. They were being given.

“Where’s Bruce now?” Clark asked. Knowing it was probably a painful topic, but hoping to hear it was some rule of magic out of a storybook, that only a child had the right kind of belief to sustain a projection of this nature. That Bruce Wayne had grown up and moved on and had a career and a family, and perhaps didn’t remember that Batman was something he’d made.

Batman’s eyes closed, and vanished completely into the black of his head. He’d kept unspooling all the while he’d been talking, Clark realized, and the gouts and folds and flame-like flickers of his cape now sprawled over more than half the roof, leaving a great circle of open space around Superman himself, and a broad open route away from Batman, as though he couldn’t just go straight up if he wanted to get away. The billows of it had now collapsed in on themselves. His voice, when he spoke, was hushed and solemn, but calm. “He didn’t make it to sixteen. He died tackling a gunman who’d been holding up a corner store where he happened to be, buying junk food he wasn’t supposed to have. The cashier fumbled the register key and bent over to pick it up, and the man panicked and started shooting. Bruce saved lives, that night. But he didn’t survive. Because I wasn’t there. I was away protecting other people, like he’d asked me to.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark said. Inadequate as always, but more so, when he’d pushed for this truth and didn’t even understand enough to know how to offer comfort. He reached out to offer a comforting, boundary-respecting brief pat on the shoulder, like he might have when he had less idea what Batman was, and his hand hung still in the air, as the face Batman turned toward him was human again, so abruptly that even to his accelerated visual perceptions it looked like some sort of glitch.

“This is his face,” Batman told him, and the grief that hadn’t been in his voice before was worn on it, in the pull of the mouth and the bend of pain around the blank white eyes. He looked like he might cry. “The way he would have looked. He never…grew this far, but…”

“In memory of him, then,” Superman said, soothing, and was able to deliver the pat on the shoulder and withdraw. It sounded like Batman was in some ways the only surviving part of Bruce Wayne, and as such had every right to his appearance, but he clearly didn’t _think_ of himself that way, and it wasn’t Clark’s place to try to alter his self-concept, or even make comment when he’d only just been introduced to it. “That seems appropriate.”

Batman shrugged. It looked very human, except for the way the cape parts of him reacted. “I knew it best.”

Had he held the memory of his…creator’s face in his head, updating it carefully to _how he would have looked_ with every year or month that passed? That couldn’t be healthy. It also might be unavoidable, considering Batman’s origins.

“You went on protecting Gotham, afterward?”

“What else would I do?”

“And you joined us. When Starro came.” Batman nodded, as though that was only obvious. Clark supposed it was—when you were a supernatural entity created to protect human beings, why would you _not_ answer a call to band together with other superpowered beings to save the world? “Why did you pretend?” he asked. “To be…”

“Human?” Batman asked. He snorted in derision, either at Clark’s inability to choose a word or his own deceit. “It wasn’t the first time. I talk to the police like this, sometimes. Witnesses. It reassures people, to be talking to a…person.”

That was the same reason J’onn made himself look more human, even in blatant green—it wasn’t entirely unlike why Clark kept his own life _as_ Clark, why Superman didn’t wear a mask. “But why…” He’d gone to such lengths, to maintain the façade. Human jaw and teeth, sculpted solid to catch X-ray vision behind flesh he’d carefully made permeable to it, when even now with the image of Bruce Wayne’s face restored he wasn’t bothering. Consistent physical proportions. Always running close against the edge of normal human limits, of strength and speed and length of jump—not hanging back, but not throwing himself onto the front line either, contributing as much with tactics and analysis as actual combat. “Why try so hard to convince us?”

Batman shrugged. “I wasn’t holding back that much. I told you. I was fading. I was never meant to last. Once it turned out the team wasn’t a one-time thing, I still didn’t want to go through the whole…process of revelation.”

“But you’re doing it now.” Clark found he was grinding his teeth, because he was putting together a picture he didn’t like. “Because. Now you’re expecting to survive.” Batman had been _dying_. He hadn’t thought it was worth the stress of being honest with them, because he hadn’t expected to exist long enough for their relationships to matter.

Superman glanced down through the roof at the sleeping children, and one child in particular.

“I wasn’t there in time to save his parents, either,” Batman said, and Clark knew that feeling—all this power and yet you could still arrive too late, and be too little. But Batman was _defined_ by that feeling, founded upon it almost, so it probably struck him deeper. “But I was there afterward. I protected him from the followup attacks, meant to stop him testifying about the sabotage he’d witnessed.

“And he clung to me, whenever I came…I do try to comfort them, especially when it’s children, but usually they’re at least a little bit afraid. He wasn’t. And he didn’t have anyone else to cling to. They wouldn’t let his parents’ friends in to see him more than once, and then they left town. And then, after I came to tell him that Zucco and his men were taken care of for good, when I left I felt the distance opening…I realized I was…his, now.”

There was a strange, wondering ache in the way he said it that made it easy for Clark to repress his own discomfort with the idea of anyone _belonging_ to anyone else, and of something that looked like a grown man asserting an intimate personal bond with an unrelated child. Batman was _supposed_ to belong to a child, it was how he’d been _made_ , and he’d expected to die by inches in the absence of the one who’d made him, and now he suddenly wasn’t. This little orphan was the most precious thing in his world, that was plain, and to Clark at least it was equally plain that he felt a deep guilt at replacing the boy who had been his world before.

He wondered, suddenly, if Batman had ever been this honest with anyone in his existence. Had he been this open even with his Bruce, or had his need to protect led him to put on a front, and conceal every uncertainty?

The pale smudge of Batman’s face was still and remote, and his voice was nearly calm, but the darkness of his cape had spilled out over the whole roof now, and it was gently writhing. The route out for Superman, opposite Batman’s main body, had shrunk to the merest footpath. Was that there out of instinct, or a more conscious courtesy?

“You don’t have to leave that,” Superman said quietly, flipping his thumb toward the corridor of open shingle and beam. “I know you aren’t trying to trap me, and it won’t anyway.”

The path snapped shut almost instantaneously, and a little of the strain in the atmosphere faded—Batman had been holding himself back from encircling him completely only with continuous effort. Why? Did he naturally expand to fill the available space? Or was expanding in the form of the cape an expression of emotion that was uncomfortable to suppress, in the same way it was hard to sit still when you felt anxious, or hold your tongue when you got mad?

His teammate’s whole torso was turned away, now, and this too was easy to read—shame at his own inhumanity. In front of Clark, of all people. But then, Clark made it look easy, didn’t he? It even was easy for him, when it came to things like _looking_ like he fit in.

J’onn should have been the one to come. But it disconcerted him not to be able to pick up _anything_ Batman did not intentionally share—Clark didn’t think he’d learned to read human body language yet, beyond the most obvious things—and Batman had been known to use fire.

“It didn’t seem wise to seem to be trying to threaten you,” Batman said flatly, into the night.

“Thank you,” said Superman, because while he didn’t mind at this point, it would definitely have made him uncomfortable earlier, before Batman had made himself so vulnerable. “Could you, do you think?”

A sidelong look. “You’re less invulnerable to magic,” Batman said. “Probably.”

Something to keep in mind. The Flash was the only teammate he had now that he was reasonably sure he could take three falls out of three. Maybe they could start practicing against each other, if they could find somewhere they could risk making a mess on that scale. Sparring—he and Diana had tried it out, gingerly. If Batman wanted to stretch out his re-expanding powers in a secure environment…

“Do you have any plans, going forward?” Now that he had a future to plan for.

“I have someone who helps me,” Batman replied. “Bruce’s guardian, after his parents died. He wanted to leave Gotham, after…but he stayed. To try to help the city, in Bruce’s memory. And to keep an eye on me.” The amusement this time was bitter. “We don’t really get along. He thinks Bruce died because of me—that I made him feel invulnerable, and then didn’t protect him. He’s projecting. But I suppose that’s what I’m for.”

Clark made a face; he didn’t like the idea of people being _for_ purposes. Even people who’d been made. This wasn’t the time to argue about it. “But he helps you?”

“He helps.” Batman glanced down, toward Dick’s bed, as though once again he could see through the roof. “I’m trying to get him to agree to take Dick in. He did a good job with Bruce, even if he doesn’t think so.”

“Will that be the best for Dick?” Clark asked, as neutrally as he could manage. He could tell Batman’s intentions were good, but he didn’t know if putting a child entirely within the influence of a supernatural being that had latched onto him, without an external line of support, was a good idea. On the other hand, putting him in the care of an adult who would know he wasn’t delusional could only help. And Clark could be the outside support, if necessary—not that he wasn’t under Batman’s influence himself, but he wasn’t within his circle of it the way this Alfred seemed to be, resentment or not. The resentment might be the most dangerous part.

What part of this train of thought Batman inferred, he couldn’t tell, as his comrade only retorted, “It can’t be worse than here!”

A group home with four beds to a room certainly wasn’t the best environment, but surely he couldn’t be here much longer. “Have you talked to him about it?”

“He doesn’t get much privacy. He agreed to meet with Alfred last time he ducked into a closet while I was there, so now Alfred’s the focus of the plan.” Batman sighed again. “He’s so brave,” he said fondly. “It worries me. I wish he were somewhere safe.”

The wild impulse rose to offer to step in, to take the role of legal guardian if this Alfred wouldn’t. Clark sat on it. He didn’t want a child, he wasn’t _equipped_ to care for a child, CPS would be able to see that perfectly well in a single reporter in his 20s living in a one-bedroom apartment in a somewhat run-down building. He didn’t even live in the same state, and child placement was handled on a state-by-state basis so even petitioning for custody would be horrifically involved, never mind obtaining it. Also, he had a secret identity to protect.

He couldn’t always help. The hardest lesson in life, and one he had to keep relearning.

“So your plans are…to get Dick into a safe home environment.”

“And keep him alive,” Batman affirmed. Quick, and firm, and almost not obvious about what a vital goal this was to him. Keeping this child alive, the way he’d failed to keep the one before.

“Of course.” Clark nodded. If everything he’d been told was true—and he thought it was, it _felt_ true—then there was no need for the League to intervene. Gotham was probably safer than it had ever been. “Can I meet him, sometime?” Partly to do his part as an outside support network. Partly because he was _curious_ , to meet this child who’d been able to reach his hand into Batman’s chest and close his fingers around his heart.

Batman glanced over, and then seemed to relax. Even the endless piles of his cape seemed suddenly to behave more like ordinary fabric. “I passed, then?”

“What?” Oh. Of course he’d known. Clark had hardly been _sneaky_. “Yes.”

“Not that I know what you were planning to do if I hadn’t.”

Clark didn’t know either, other than get Dick away of he seemed to need it.

“All of this is off the record, of course,” Batman added. It was a testament to how distracted Superman was by Batman’s problems that it took a long second for him to realize the potential implications of that choice of words, and read in Batman’s posture and the way his cape had developed hooks of tension in some of its folds that they were entirely intentional.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

“You attended a press event in Gotham two years ago. You still _feel_ like you, no matter how you dress.”

“Well.” Superman tried to shake the sudden tension out of his shoulders. Batman was a good detective and data analyst, that hadn’t changed with the rest of it. He’d certainly tracked down the name of the gentleman from the _Planet_. “I guess that’s fair. And of course it’s off the record. I won’t even tell J’onn and Diana anything but the basics without your permission.”

“Oh.” Batman clearly hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

“You have a right to your privacy.” Clark thought back over his own approach to the whole situation and said, with a gentleness born somewhat of guilt, “You are a person, after all.”

“I’m really not,” Batman said, corner of his mouth ticking up just slightly to underline the easy irony in his voice. But the great spread of cape had fallen into easier, more geometric wrinkles, and Clark was beginning to learn to trust that over what he said with his borrowed face. Though he could almost definitely lie with the cape part of himself, too, if he needed to; he shouldn’t trust it too unthinkingly.

“Don’t…” His tongue flickered across the back of his teeth; be brave, Kent. “Don’t talk about my friend that way, huh?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter! But it's as long as it needs to be. Let's keep some momentum up, eh?

Robin flew.

He’d kept in condition for four _years_ with no audience, no ring. A net he’d got, at least, by terrifying Alfred enough times. A catcher, he’d gotten by jumping and knowing Batman would be there, until Batman stopped expecting any different.

But even the deepest parts of the caves that riddled the bluffs beneath the house didn’t measure up to the circus, or to this.

The one light that he always carried with him on his explorations flickering wildly over stalactites and gleaming-wet walls and startled streams of bats, as he spun down through the dark until it rose up to embrace him in dark wings…that was always an amazing sight, a beauty and a privilege to witness flashing over the secrets of the underground, but he’d been born for footlight and spotlight. The distant glittering of Gotham spread out underfoot was so much _closer_ to where he belonged.

He made the landing clean, boots connecting with rooftop ever so gently and his knees absorbing the last of the force by folding, until his hand in its bright glove touched, too, just as he ran out of momentum. “See?” he said. Stood up, so he could look out across the lights below, and rolled his shoulders back as if shaking out a set of feathers he had never had. His bright cape was too soft to make much sound.

“I do.”

There was reserve in the voice that spoke out of the shadow of the skyscraper’s great spire, which stretched up into what had to be more lightning rod than _anything_ needed, but Dick ignored that. His point was made.

“It’s going to be _fine_ ,” he said.

The red light at the top of the spire blinked on, a warning to any oncoming aircraft that the building went up further than it seemed to from its profile, and that it was there at all, and Batman let the redness wash the dark away around him, and stood visibly separate from the surface of the tower.

And then walked with a sound of footsteps out onto the top of the second-highest building in Gotham, to take in the lights that painted out the city, the end of his cape dragging softly along the rooftop and settling in a loose loop around the two of them, as he came to a halt at Robin’s side. “I hope so,” he said.

Dick nudged Batman’s side with his shoulder. It had more give than it should have, even allowing for not being all bones like Alfred, the human person he had most occasion to touch these days, or lean hard muscle like his parents had been, but there was warmth. He was pretty sure Batman did that on purpose, for him, to give better hugs. Saying anything would only make him self-conscious about it, so Dick hadn’t. It was nice. “Hey. You _know_ you’re happy to have my help. Admit it.”

He _did_ help, even if keeping him safe was a distraction. Even Batman could only be in one place at a time, after all; Robin gave a second angle, another set of eyes, another set of blows.

And there was power in having him nearby, he knew, even though Batman would never talk about it; power in needing to win because Dick was right there—they hadn’t fought anyone together yet where Batman needed that edge, but he wasn’t going to _forget_ the few times since he’d come to Gotham that Batman had been matched, and dragged home too battered and weary to step out of the shadows. The time Doctor Death had come so _close_ to defeating him, until Dick stole a megaphone off the cop herding him back with the rest of the crowd and _screamed_ for him to get up.

Playing normal person in public was so hard on him. Dick wished he didn’t feel like he had to.

Batman added, “But I worry.”

Robin sighed a little. “I know, Batman.” Losing his boy had hurt Batman like losing his parents had hurt Dick. He wouldn’t do that to him again. But he _couldn’t_ stay home doing nothing just to comfort him, either. You could die all _kinds_ of ways. Car accidents. Robberies. Murder. Slipping in the bath. If you never took any risks and then died anyway, what had you gained by being careful?

He blinked out across the Gotham panorama, at the place where the Police Headquarters was now painting the underside of the smog in gold. “Look, Batman!” he pointed. “Your spotlight’s shining.”

Batman followed his pointing, neck twisting a little further than it should have been able to, and growled exasperation in a voice like distant motors. “And I suppose you want to come with.”

Dick laughed. “That was kind of the _point_ , wasn’t it? Keeping a close eye on me?”

“No, that was your _leverage_.” Batman still sounded annoyed about it.

But it wasn’t like Dick was threatening to go out on his own otherwise _just_ to make Batman let him come with. He’d stayed home this long, even though he didn’t want to, _because_ Batman worried. But he wasn’t a little kid anymore, and if he was going to go out anyway Batman had learned from last time better than to leave him alone.

The ends of the cape curled in closer around Robin’s feet, not quite touching. Dick buried his fingers in it, and tipped the side of his head into the soft warmth of Batman’s side. “Aw, come on, don’t be like that.”

“Jim knows now I’m not what I pretended to be,” Batman told him. “Barbara has told him everything she learned.”

Dick was still angry with her for that, enough to outweigh even his gratitude to her for cracking open the door he’d wedged himself through since, with her adventures as Batgirl. Being disappointed Batman wasn’t just some guy in a costume who could pass on his techniques if you impressed him enough made sense, but her rejection had _hurt_ his best friend. Batman wasn’t any less of a hero because he wasn’t human.

She’d seemed contrite after he gave her a piece of his mind, told her she was just as bad as the bigots who didn’t trust Superman on account of him being from space, but she’d still ratted Batman out to her dad even after that. So he was still holding it against her.

“You said he was okay with it.”

“Mm. It’s still a bit too early to give him anything new to chew on.”

And a middle school student in spangles following Batman across the dark of the city might be a lot to chew. If Gordon didn’t lay eyes on him, it might take him a while to realize Dick _was_ human, and thus his business. “So I should stay here?”

“Yes. Stay here. And if you need me…” Batman glanced back out of the shadow even as he began to melt into it, the long folds of his cape drawing reluctantly away. “Call.”

“I’m staying _right here,_ what kind of trouble could I possibly get into?”

White eyes made a circuit of the rooftop with only the vaguest silhouette of a head around them. The red light blinked on again, but did nothing to chase the dark away. “You could fall.”

“Me? Never.” Dick grinned, and refrained from going into a handstand to prove his balance. The wind did gust pretty hard sometimes, at this height; he wouldn’t reassure Batman by not maintaining a solid footing.

All the same. A Grayson wasn’t going to fall. Not without somebody pushing.

He cut his eyes away to make it easier for Batman to disappear, and when he looked back he was alone.

The wind blew cold over Gotham, but it felt like a friend, and he wrapped his bright cape around himself and crouched down in place to watch their city.

If anything went so wrong he could see it from up here, Batman would understand if Robin met him at the scene.


End file.
